Coe Review

Gut Bay
Elizabeth Eslami
There is a story I have not yet told my young wife. It is not that I don't
trust her. It is not that I am afraid of how she will react. It is a story my
previous wife knew, a story she and I can reminisce about, even now, when
we have drinks and talk about our divorce, and the days before our divorce.
But I will not tell my new wife, because right now, she is perfect. Something
fresh out of a box, something which smells like newness.
It is a story I will tell her some day, maybe, when it feels right in the
telling. The way fishermen know when to pull up their lines or when to
come in from the ocean.
Even now, as my new wife cuts sushi, making long, smooth movements
with her slender wrist, I see the red of the salmon against the cutting board,
and I am back there, back on that island, walking up to the cabin.
And I wonder if I will ever tell her.
From a distance, I remember the curtains looked like pieces of drying
caribou meat, like what those Eskimo women hang from homemade racks
and trees and the abandoned frames of rusted-out cars. There was something
almost shocking about those curtains, all that red and white color against
the gray sky and ground. Dora had made the red checkered curtains and
hung them in the windows. You could see them all the way from the bay.
I kept staring at the cabin, with its red windows, ignoring Mr. Voss'
complaints as his shoes sunk deep into the tundra.
Joe, I think it was, was the one who saw the curtains. "Let's dock at
Baranof," he said, "til it calms down a bit. There's a cabin over there." The
deckhand shrugged, went up to talk to the captain, and the next thing we
knew, we were tying up the boat and hiking through knee-deep fireweed
towards the cabin.
We probably made a spectacle, three city guys from California. I'm sure
we did, because just before we got to the door, a young boy came out and
stood on the porch, staring at us. His mouth was open and loose, glittering
with saliva. He shouted for his Daddy, and that was when we met Lloyd.
I knew him as a careful and skilled man.
He was the father of fourteen children, a homesteader with his wife,
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